All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 84: Decision Time

[Author's note: I've left the dad situation for Sarah/Emilia unanswered for quite a while. They were always intended to be out of the picture, but in hindsight, an explanation toward the beginning of the story would have been a good idea. But rather than go back and add that in retroactively, I figured it would be better to wait and include that information at a time when it was relevant]

The next week was a blur, but not in the same way that the last two months had been. I settled into a routine. I had the occasional doctor's appointment in the morning. Time with the therapist in the afternoon

It wasn't a bad life. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were brought right up to my room. And I had the evening free to play video games as long into the night as I could stay awake.

But a week later, I still had no news about Mom and Emilia. Still no update from all the tests they had run on me when I had first arrived at the hospital. What had been the point of getting poked and prodded like that if they weren't going to tell me what it meant?

Jane had told me to be patient, as lab results could take some time to return, and even then, she would need to look at all of them carefully to try to see what conclusions she could draw from that data.

During the first few days, I'd had a couple of close calls with having a messy accident. But with a private toilet set aside for my own use, I'd been able to avoid a repeat of the disaster that had taken place during the police interview. But aside from going number two on the toilet, I was using the diaper for everything else.

Debrah had discreetly restocked the dresser a couple of times with additional diapers for me. I caught sight of the pull-ups each time I reached into the dresser to grab a clean diaper, but I could never bring myself to grab one of the pull-ups. It still felt wrong, like something I was forbidden from doing.

After a comfortable first day of getting to know each other, the conversations with the therapist delved into the uncomfortable details of what had transpired in the past six months. She didn't pass judgment on any of the decisions I had made. She mostly asked questions and, in doing so, forced me to think about things in ways I hadn't previously considered. It wasn't as though I couldn't tell that she was trying to direct me to certain conclusions, but she shied away from directly telling me what they were.

And then there was the discussion about diapers. The topic didn't get brought up until the middle of the third day I had been seeing the therapist. We had danced around it before, but it had yet to be brought up by name at that point. Like Jane, the therapist didn't actually use the word diapers. Her preferred euphemism was protective underwear. It didn't catch on for me.

She didn't address the medical side of things. But we talked about separating diapers from being treated like a baby. I wanted more than anything to get her opinion of Samantha's behavior, but I was too nervous to bring it up. What would she have made of that?

That wasn't to say the conversations hadn't helped. By the evening after the fourth day of therapy, I managed to fall asleep without putting my thumb in my mouth.

A number of other things became clear during our conversations together. For one, I learned an important new word: narcissism. That is what the therapist used to describe my mother's behavior. Mom hadn't loved me. She wasn't capable of loving me. And the way she had treated me had been horribly wrong even before my incontinence had begun, with arbitrary rules and punishments, designed not for my own well-being, but to protect her own self-image of a successful parent.

Everything Mom had done had been in service to and in preservation of her own self-image. That was the essence of narcissism. Everything that had happened had been about her. Her need to be in control. Her need to shape me into what she wanted to be. She saw my imperfections as a reflection of herself and, therefore, sought to remove them and, in failing to do so, to punish me for them.